Today is Veteran’s Day so I feel like the first order of business is to say a big thank you to all the brave men and women who have fought to defend our freedom. We owe you a debt of gratitude beyond what a few words can express.
On a completely different note, Caroline stayed home from school on Monday because she started running a low-grade fever on Sunday night and felt generally crummy. It could have just been allergies but it’s so hard to tell this time of year what’s a legit illness and what may just be seasonal fatigue in the form of WE ARE ALL READY FOR THANKSGIVING BREAK. I, for one, am so ready to be able to put up the rubber cement for a few days. I had no idea seventh grade was going to require so much rubber cement but the projects? They are endless.
We have made tee-pees, travel brochures, real estate listings for Texas property, flash cards about cellular respiration, old world menus, and a partridge in a pear tree. Actually we haven’t made a partridge in a pear tree yet but I bet it’s coming and we’ll have to cover the whole thing in feathers using rubber cement and diagram all the individual parts and then attach an essay about why we believe partridges should or should not be allowed in pear trees.
Anyway, the point is (assuming there is a point to be made) that Caroline stayed home from school on Monday. And her favorite lazy activity these days is to look around on Pinterest. I know this to be true because many of our school mornings are now like a pop quiz at a beauty school where she rushes into the kitchen three minutes before we need to walk out the door and asks, “Mom, can you do my hair in a messy triple dutch braid like this one on Pinterest?” as she shows me a braid that would make Princess Elsa claw her eyes out in jealousy.
Right. Like if I had that kind of hair styling ability I would be walking around with a sad bun on top of my head 99% of the time.
I have some hair skills. I can curl or straighten hair like it’s my job. I can do a simple French braid. I can do a ponytail and even tease the crown to give it some body. But I am not a magician. I cannot turn fine hair that’s been slept on wet and treated to absolutely zero products into a Dutch braided masterpiece. Not even (insert famous Dutch person here) could do that.
I told Caroline that one day after she asked me to do something “cool” with her hair. I explained it would be really hard to do and she asked, “Why?” and I replied, “Because you have no product in your hair.” She looked right at me and implored, “WHY DOES IT ALWAYS COME BACK TO PRODUCT WITH YOU?”
To which I replied, “Because it always comes back to product.”
Seventh grade is as awesome as a parent as it was as a seventh-grader.
And so I’ve now spent some time explaining to Caroline that very few things in real life turn out like they do on Pinterest. Remember that time we had the white couch? It was not like Pinterest AT ALL, largely because you don’t see women in the pictures of white couches on Pinterest weeping over the fresh chocolate stain on slipcovers that had just been washed and cleaned five seconds before.
This wasn’t even supposed to be about hair. And yet here we are 600 words later. You know why? Because it always comes back to product.
So back to my original story. Caroline stayed home from school on Monday and we started looking around on the internet for a pair of booties. She wants a pair but hasn’t been able to find any she really likes and I hate to break it to her but what she’s describing sound eerily similar to the Esprit booties I wore in high school.
We looked at Nordstrom, Zappos, Macys and several other online stores to find this elusive bootie before she finally declared, “SHOPPING IS HARD!” I looked at her and laughed and said, “You think this is hard? There was a time before the internet where you had to walk around an actual building called a mall and go in multiple stores to find what you wanted. In the snow. Up a hill. Both ways.”
And she doesn’t even want to know how much product our hair required back then.